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Kim Wilde: 100 marriage proposals a week!

Date

January 1, 1982

Published in

Zondagsblad (Belgium)

"People have asked me hundreds of times why I never laugh in photographs", says Kim Wilde, Englands most popular teenage idol since a year or two. "Some of them wrote that it was a gimmick. That I wanted to act tough. But in reality I never really thought about it. Whenever I see a photographer, I just don't feel like laughing."
"It is something I inherited from the past", she explains. "When I was little, my father Marty was an idol in England and he was often photographed with his wife and children. I didn't like it then. I felt I was very ugly back then. I never became self-assured until I had my first few hits. Before then, in school, I was the ugly duckling. I never had a boyfriend and I was very jealous when my girlfriends told me about their adventures. Now I get a hundred marriage proposals a week. And still that insecurity hasn't totally disappeared. When a picture is taken, I am still afraid that I will look dreadful in it. This is why I rarely laugh in pictures."

Blonde Kim owes her success firstly to her father Marty and secondly her brother Ricky. "They write all my songs", she says. "Our family has become a business. Father and Ricky make the product and I sell it. I owe everything to my dad. Without him I would maybe never have started singing. He taught me to sing, he learned me the ropes of the business and went by the record companies with my first demo."

Still the relationship between father and daughter hasn't always been this easy. After Kim's first successes the problems followed one another quickly. "The success came as a total surprise and I thought I could do it all on my own", Kim says. "I was critical of all decisions made by my father, and I didn't realise how childish my behaviour was becoming. I even thought of moving out at some point. Everyone was writing that I owed so much to my father and I wanted to prove I could do it without him. But now I realise that was a stupid impulse. It is no shame to be supported by your father through thick and thin."